Front row at theatres of sexuality

Rebirth and reinvention - these themes are the focus of current photography shows, writes Robert McFarlane.

In Robert Walker's neatly spaced photographs at Charles Hewitt Gallery, viewers may find nothing less than a visual history of Australian theatre's rebirth. From the quiet heroics of Robin Lovejoy at the Old Tote Theatre in the '60s to the exuberant new wave of Australian theatre that followed, led by John Bell, Richard Wherrett and Ken Horler, Walker photographed them all.

This exhibition captures Bell, for example, at the peak of his early powers, and preserves forever some of the pioneers of Australian theatre and dance. It was with a start I recognised a youthful, unlined Mel Gibson in On Our Selection and the late, great John Hargreaves in the cast of an early Nimrod production of Biggles.

Walker's remarkable career, established after being seriously wounded while flying Albemarle bombers for the Royal Air Force during World War II, spans his well-known portraits of Australian artists and the three decades he spent photographing theatre in Australia.

This exhibition, in its quiet, low-key way, compels us to acknowledge Walker's considerable contribution to documenting this country's artistic life.

With the Gay Games fast approaching, other exhibitions are focusing on gender and sexuality. Refreshingly, one imaginative display deals with the often-ignored subject of sexuality and the disabled.");document.write("

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Belinda Mason-Lovering's Intimate Encounters at Argyle Stores in The Rocks, follows a path far removed from the usual photojournalistic treatment of the disabled.

Mason-Lovering uses digitally manipulated photography to symbolically illustrate the dreams and aspirations of this community. A blind man, for example, is photographed standing naked next to a young woman in a landscape populated by columns of precariously leaning books. Paralympian swimmer Denise Beckwith, who has cerebral palsy, is seamlessly transformed into a mermaid.

This is a surreal approach that can occasionally falter, but Mason-Lovering's clear affection for her subjects leads us towards a deeper understanding of a subject of great poignancy. There are also images in this exhibition that use little, if any, digital intervention. I found Mason-Lovering's melancholy nude portrait of the recently deceased screenwriter Heather Rose, with her yearning face turned to camera, quite unforgettable.

A few days earlier, as I joined the crowd walking up the steps leading into Stills gallery, someone whispered, "William Yang has more pictures on the walls here than at his exhibition at the State Library."

And so it seemed. Yang's show, Miscellaneous Obsessions, fills the walls of the gallery, spilling up into the mezzanine where only black and white images are used to outline his family history.

Judging from these pictures, the lives of Yang's ancestors appear to have been filled with mundaneness, hard work, some soldiering and flashes of real drama. Yang explores, yet again, in detail, the murder of a family member. The residual emotion on leaving this segment of Yang's exhibition is of warmth for an Australian family that gave as deeply as any, in peace and war, to this country.

Yang's major colour display shows that this artist, by his own admission, has tried to reinvent himself. Gone is Yang's expressive chronicling of gay culture in gritty black and white. Instead, these new images radiate sunlight, colour and sometimes simple, aerobic fun in their celebration of daily life.

But, as always, there can be a sting in the telling of Yang's diarist tales.

Immediately after being quietly amused by Yang's portrayal of two meals - one, elegant fare at a consulate, the other a more earthy cafe meal - I found myself standing in front of a colour picture of what I assumed were a pair of inflatable animal toys. However, Yang's title soon revealed them to be freshly cooked echidnas. I quickly made a mental note delaying my exploration of bush tucker a little longer.

This exhibition expands our understanding of Yang's concerns, but his preoccupation with quantity worried me. After considering the mass of images Yang provided, I found myself struggling to remember many outstanding individual pictures. This photographer has always produced the individual, powerfully poetic statement. Perhaps Yang should place his trust in the idea that less can sometimes achieve more.

Photo Technica's Exhibition Space has three artists showing in concert with the 2002 Gay Games - Jane Wilson, Nairn Scott and Jordan/ McRae.

Wilson's silent melodies, a series of brooding colour images of dark, suburban spaces, proved as menacing as any fashioned by Antonioni is his '60s film, Blow-Up. Once created, however, there is little further to travel on Wilson's artistic journey - just atmosphere to be felt. Scott's Grey Area seemed anything but grey, and far removed from photography. His images did, however, contain pleasing colour abstractions.

Jordan/McRae's The Raft Project attempts to create a contemporary gay equivalent to Gericault's 1819 satiric masterpiece, The Raft of Medusa. Each of Jordan/McRae's "rafts" is, in reality, a beer pallet populated by athletic but ailing men afloat on a sea of blue plastic. The photographers claim these images represent a "ravaged ... youth-driven, intolerant community ... destroying itself from within."

Despite their declared ambition to create a cautionary tale, the photographers instead resort to a grim series of pastiches, lightened only by the occasionally wacky presence of a couple of drag queens.

Point Light Gallery is showing the landscape photography of Gordon Undy, the gallery's co-founder.

Undy's works have been selected from his self-published book, Lines, written in Australia, and are printed using three differing processes: the exquisite hand-coated platinum palladium technique, print-out paper (a process that has existed from the earliest days of photography) and conventional photographic paper.

These techniques, at first glance, suggest a classic view of landscape photography.

All are well composed and contact printed from large negatives made with a view camera, the kind of device in which the photographer vanishes under a black cloth in order to make a picture.

But present in these new Undy images (all made within the past 12 months) is a complexity of vision suggesting a change in his way of seeing the Australian landscape. Black Mountain Study No1 shows Undy is unafraid to use a rougher sense of composition to say something new about the bush. This is one of a number of impolite, but satisfying photographs in the book and the show. (Lines, written in Australia is available for $75 from Point Light Gallery.)

The Australian Centre for Photography's current exhibition Re-identifications explores gender, sexuality and race. Garrie Maguire's Thoughts on Assimilation series shows a muscular Asian man playing a variety of roles - IT professional, surgeon and in an inspired piece of what I took to be improvisation, a bare-torsoed Ned Kelly, complete with square helmet fashioned from a paper bag. But the segment at the ACP that touched me deepest was Tina FiveAsh's five images calibrating the transition, anatomically as well as in dress, of a woman to a man.

Ray Cook's absurdist tableaux had a light touch that rescues them from self-consciousness, while C. Moore Hardy's group portraits were adequate, but seemed content to merely label subjects, without going further into their character.

In the smaller chamber at the ACP, there is a video installation by James Verdon of a certain mirrored delicacy. I confess to quite enjoying the one ephemeral note of mortality it explored incessantly.